David D. Woods, Creating Safety by Engineering Resilience

Major figures in the study of complexity were invited to speak at IBM's annual Almaden Institute on the theme of "Navigating Complexity" at IBM Almaden Research Center, CA, April 11-12, 2007 (see link). David Woods was one of the invited leaders based on his research on how human systems adapt to cope with complexity. His talk -- Creating Safety by Engineering Resilience -- is available on the web here . A new book chapter is also available:

Woods, D. D. and Wreathall, J. (in press). Stress-Strain Plot as a Basis for Assessing System Resilience. In E. Hollnagel, C. Nemeth and S. W. A. Dekker, eds., Resilience Engineering: Remaining sensitive to the possibility of failure. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, pp. 145-161. [download chapter]

About the Talk

About David D. Woods

David Woods’ recent work in resilient engineering to improve safety is based on his large body of work in the Cognitive Systems Engineering field, including accident investigations in nuclear power, medicine and critical care safety, and space operations. Multimedia overviews of his research are available at the C/S/E/L website and he is co-author of the monographs Behind Human Error (1994), A Tale of Two Stories: Contrasting Views of Patient Safety (1998), Joint Cognitive Systems (2005; 2006), and Resilience Engineering (2006).